Letters
Economism
James Turley, in his usual arrogant style (he “answers the philistines”), sets out his anti-Leninist views (‘Fur flies over Lenin’, March 22). He sets up a straw-man Lenin who “aimed to build a delimited, highly disciplined party of ‘professional revolutionaries’” and then demolishes this self-created nonsense. The party of ‘professional revolutionaries’ was for illegality when open work was very dangerous. It does not constitute the essence of Leninism at all. We find this in his battle with the economists. And that battle is still ongoing.
In an article entitled ‘The birth of the Bolshevik party’ (Socialist Worker January 21), Julie Sherry correctly sets out the differences between a revolutionary party, as pioneered in theory and practice by Lenin, and a reformist ‘party of the whole class’, as practised by the Mensheviks and theorised by Karl Kautsky: “The Mensheviks stuck to the ‘common sense’ idea that a socialist party meant one party for all workers, even if they had different politics. But Vladimir Lenin … had another idea of what a party should be. His model starts with the fact that there is a spectrum of ideas within the working class - from revolutionary to reactionary, with most people falling somewhere in between. So, while some workers accept racist ideas, for example, others are staunchly anti-racist. Lenin said a revolutionary party should group together those with the most advanced ideas so they can try to win over other people.”
There, in a few pithy sentences, is the essence of Leninism. So the British SWP has made a great leap forward and at last overcome its opportunism and tail-endist political method? Unfortunately, no, because later in the piece she manages to assert the exact opposite to this position: “The Bolsheviks understood that the party learns from the working class and is forged in the thick of class struggle. Its role is not to bring ‘great ideas’ ready-made to workers too ignorant to have them. It is to take the best ideas thrown up by workers themselves, such as the soviets, and attempt to generalise them.”
Not even the “great ideas”, “ready-made” in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, are sufficient to lead these workers; apparently: they will just lead themselves and the task of revolutionaries is to spoon-feed them what they already know in a ‘generalised’ and refined way - as the ignorant, anti-theoretical anarchists and ‘left’ communists thought and still think. This is substituting class-consciousness for Marxist theory.
There is a widespread rejection of democratic centralism in favour of ‘pluralist’ parties at the moment. All types of liberal anti-Trotskyists wish to be free of the discipline of the class struggle under the guise of escaping from ‘sectarianism’ and ‘dogmatism’. Without a revolutionary party based on democratic centralism as its organisational norm, it is impossible to educate the membership and the broader vanguard in revolutionary theory. We cannot learn from struggle unless we unite in struggle against the common enemy. Therefore, democratic centralism is necessary because of the peculiar form of oppression endured by the working class and their fightback against this. When they engage in serious strike struggles, they are obliged to mount picket lines. Whatever the law says, they know that to win in the first place they must prevent the more backward of their ranks breaking the strike. If it is a serious struggle, all talk of democracy is forgotten and the battle commences in earnest.
Workers’ democracy denies democracy to capitalists to hire and fire at will and to other workers to scab. It requires the fullest discussions before votes are taken and these should be taken at meetings, where workers feel their collective strength, rather than in individual postal ballots, where workers are isolated and subject to media and domestic pressures. Once a majority decides some action, then the organisation must enforce compliance from opponents within its own ranks by whatever means available to it. So workers’ democracy is for struggle - workers’ organisations sorting out what they need to do in full discussion, enforcing their decisions by whatever means necessary at their disposal. Significantly, the Tories directed most of their anti-union legislation against these norms of workers’ democracy.
As the highest form of workers’ organisation, the revolutionary party must both reflect and develop the elements of workers’ democracy into a conscious practice and organisational norm. Thus the theory of DC was extracted from, and developed out of, the practice of the working class in struggle. The democracy is for deciding how to struggle; the centralism is in ensuring we strike together, so we can learn from our victories and defeats. In deciding how to handle serious political and ideological differences in the group, it is surely reasonable to demand that these are first raised internally on the highest body available to the member or members. The right to form tendencies must be facilitated by the constitution and must be seen as a normal part of internal life. It must be positively encouraged when substantial differences appear, because these generally reflect real problems within the class. Only by serious debate and struggle can theoretical advances be made.
But nonetheless there is a grain of truth - or, more correctly, good reason for the confusion displayed - in the centrist method of Julie Sherry and the SWP. It was not enough simply to have the correct programme and put that forward to the masses in a propagandistic manner. That is what Lenin learned from the failed revolution of 1905 and the appearance of the soviets; there he saw how he had ‘bent the stick’. But that did not mean that Lenin now adopted the method of the Mensheviks, which produced such good, but short-term results. Their opportunism contained an element of listening to the masses, but it tail-ended them to such a degree that it quickly led to disaster when reality imposed itself on the masses and on them. From this experience, he developed the theory of the Leninist party and, with it, the correct methodology of communism: how to intervene and win the leadership of the masses.
Lenin says of the economists (and he might be referring to the CPGB, the SWP and the academics Pham Binh, Paul Le Blanc and Lars T Lih): “There is politics and politics. Thus, we see that Rabochaya Mysl does not so much deny the political struggle as it bows to its spontaneity, to its unconsciousness. While fully recognising the political struggle (better: the political desires and demands of the workers), which arises spontaneously from the working class movement itself, it absolutely refuses independently to work out a specifically social democratic politics corresponding to the general tasks of socialism and to present-day conditions in Russia.”
“Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary party” is justly one of Lenin’s best remembered quotes.
Economism
Economism
Qualitative?
Dave Vincent agrees with me that the Labour Party has “always sold out the workers”, but - urging us to abandon the struggle to democratise the party and to leave the bureaucracy’s domination unchallenged - he tells us, impatiently, how “successive quantitative changes” under Blair, Brown and co “lead to a qualitative change” (Letters, March 22).
Well, they can do, but this is wishful thinking. The simple fact is that Labour was born as a bourgeois workers’ party, and is still a bourgeois workers’ party. I do not agree that there was “Nothing new with Blair, Brown and co”. But the long evolution of the step-by-step incorporation of the trade union and Labour Party bureaucracy into the capitalist state, described by Ralph Miliband in his 1960 book Parliamentary socialism and continued during the subsequent half century, has not ended the trade union link.
Chris Strafford insists: “No change has occurred: the bureaucratic machine remains intact” (Letters, March 22). Precisely. But Chris seems to regards Marxists’ struggle to win Labour to Marxism, to transform Labour into a party that backs working class struggle instead of running capitalism, as a mere tactic to be undertaken when the going is good. No, it is a strategic necessity in the struggle for socialism.
Chris wants to “ditch amateur sects for an actual party project” and organise “resistance at the base of the unions” to “democratise the unions”. Good. But democratising the trade unions and democratising the party they created is the same struggle, against the same bureaucracy - the bureaucracy of the workers’ movement. Uniting the revolutionary left is not an alternative to challenging the domination of the bureaucracy. When the revolutionary sects eventually stop splitting and start uniting around Marxism, they will have to overcome Labourism in order to win over the majority of our class.
Qualitative?
Qualitative?
Absolution
Comrade Dave Vincent seems convinced that the Labour Party will never change - not under any circumstances, never ever, so there. Is a political analysis based on the idea that nothing will change really one of someone who calls themselves a socialist?
How remarkable would it be that in the grip of the revolution the Labour Party clung to Blairite - or, for that matter, Bennite - politics? The expectation has to be that we play the long game and build a presence inside the Labour Party as well as outside it. The party of the class must extend its roots into every institution - political, social and economic. That means the boy scouts, the Labour Party, the local credit union, the co-ops, the working men’s clubs, and so on, and bring to them the perspectives of a class conscious of its position in history and its potential once again.
The comrade rattles off examples that could be called a version of the question asked by Reg in The life of Brian: ‘What’s the Labour Party ever done for us?’ Well, there’s the roads - the Special Roads Act of 1949 laid the initial legislative steps towards motorway building in the UK - the health service, the welfare state (quite possibly a section of the civil service that made many of his members’ jobs necessary), the building of entirely new towns to rehouse the blitz-battered workers and the education acts that made secondary education a right for all. The Open University, the Race Relations Act of 1965, the Trades Description Act, the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, the abolition of capital punishment for murder, decriminalisation of homosexuality, the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, the Police Act of 1976, which brought in a formal process for complaining about the police, the Human Rights Act, devolution, minimum wage, freedom of information, the Concessionary Bus Travel act 2007 (free bus travel for the old or disabled), agency workers regulations in 2010, and so on. But, apart from that, what has the Labour Party ever done for us?
Instead of pooh-poohing those of us who choose to get into the only party the working class has and seek to introduce Marxism to its perspectives, however many generations it may take, perhaps this dull, pessimistic civil servant could come out the closet and make peace with the big blue Tory inside himself that fears even the most feeble of attempts to change the certainties of his little workers’ England, where the Labour Party are the enemy and forever more shall be so. And his noble members in the civil service who followed orders and sent the emails that requisitioned the bullets, the depleted uranium shells and smart bombs that blew up their fellow workers in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow absolved, whilst the Labour Party is not.
Absolution
Absolution
Hard knocks
Those sects outside the Labour Party have learnt nothing and know nothing of how the class moves. Their shrill denunciations of the leaders of the Labour Party are correct, but no-one is listening.
The Tories are continuing with the programme set in motion by the Labour leadership. The Labour leaders cosy up to the city, don’t support strikes, accept that the working class has to bail out the banks and criticise ineffectively the cap on benefits (they could have explained that anyone in work should get at least £26,000 rather than take it out on those whose benefits payments are over £26,000). They continued with privatisation in the national health service, which has been a disaster, but has redistributed wealth to the rich. The LP leaders support the war in Afghanistan and the covert torturing of suspects in secret prisons situated all over the world. The pension reforms suggested by Hutton are robbing us blind. They didn’t they renationalise the railways, water, gas, electricity or telecoms?
Now ask yourself, why are the votes for the sectarian groups derisory, when the Tories are protecting the class they represent; the Lib Dems are in bed with the Tories; and the Labour Party does not support the working class (and is under the control of public school oiks and suit men)?
The working class is going to experience some hard knocks over the coming years. It is on the basis of events, events, events that it will be propelled into the trade unions and the Labour Party. Nothing will be built outside the mass organisations of the class. Witness the debacles of the Socialist Alliance, Respect, the Scottish Socialist Party - all have come to nothing. Only the blind cannot see that this is inevitable.
Hard knocks
Hard knocks
Not well oiled
Depending on which particular research one specifies, world peak oil has either been with us since the turn of the century or will occur at the latest by 2015. World peak oil is the maximum possible extraction of petroleum, after which a ‘plateau’ will occur and then a slow, but inexorable decline in oil production. In short, the effects of peak oil may not become apparent until some time after the event has occurred. A major economic decline, such as the current one, will obviously lengthen the period of grace.
It is worth mentioning that peak oil refers to relatively easily accessible, and therefore relatively cheap, oil and not ‘unconventional’ oil, such as tar sands. Some of the ‘unconventional’ oil will require almost as much energy to obtain as it could provide and some of it would cause massive environmental damage to obtain. The idea that the laws of supply and demand will negate any effects of world peak oil can therefore be rejected.
Capitalism has had an enormous boost from being able to rely on an abundant and reliable supply of cheap energy. However, capitalism, precisely because it is an economic system which relies on continually expanding production, would appear to be singularly inappropriate to cope with a period of energy scarcity. Likewise this scenario must deal the final blow to ‘productive forces’ theories of socialism.
Mike Macnair (Letters, March 22) may be correct and some new technology of which we are not yet aware may come to the rescue; then again it may not. As to what the consequences of world peak oil may be, the scenarios range from energy adjustment to catastrophe theories.
Unlike Tony Clark, I do not write off Marxism as ‘obsolete’ because energy abundance was taken for granted within the doctrine: the point is to bring the theory into line with reality (this goes for environmental degradation as well). It is no longer acceptable for ‘Marxist economists’ to be writing about the crisis with no reference to the mid- to long-term consequences of world peak oil as if, because it does not exist in their terms of reference, it does not exist at all. This is pure idealism.
Looking at the history of the left, what may very well happen is that the issue of world peak oil will be ignored until the consequences are too obvious to ignore - and then will come the rush by each microsect to claim to have ‘predicted’ it years back (many of the grouplets now claim to have ‘predicted’ the demise of the USSR, but always after the event!).
However, it does not have to be this way and, if nothing else, Clark has done a persistent job of bringing peak oil to the attention of Weekly Worker readers and should be credited for that. World peak oil is likely to be a game changer and to simply dismiss it or ignore it would be to ossify Marxist theory into a dogma.
Not well oiled
Not well oiled
Compulsory
To tie in to my letter last week, Marx and Guesde called for “legal prohibition of bosses employing foreign workers at a wage less than that of French workers”. Another application of economic interventionism in favour of labour could be included in our demands in relation to migrants: pro-cooperative compulsory purchase against bosses who hire foreign workers at wages less than that of domestic workers. This would, of course, be funded by various specific business taxes.
Compulsory
Compulsory